Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 45 (1994), 923-926

REVIEW

Paul Horwich (ed.)World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science

MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993, pp. 356, £40.50

Paul Hoyningen-HueneReconstructing Scientific Revolutions:

Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of ScienceChicago University Press, Chicago, 1993, (trans. A. Levin),

pp. xx + 310, £30.50/543.75 cloth, £12.75/518.25 paper

Stathis PsillosDepartment of Philosophy

King's College, London

Almost three-quarters of a million people all over the world have bought(and probably read) T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Kuhn's innocent-looking publication in the positivists' Encyclopedia ofUnified Science, thirty-two years ago, was bound to cause a great stiramong the prevalent philosophical views of science and historiographicaltechniques. Kuhn's account of the dynamic of scientific growth—para-digm —* normal science —» puzzle-solving —> anomaly —• crisis —> extra-ordinary science —» revolution —» normal science—became widely knownas the last nail in the coffin of the positivist conception of science and theturning point in the subsequent demise of Popperianism.

Philosophers of the most divergent persuasions have taken pains to spellout the commitments of and eventually repudiate the emergent Kuhnianimage of science. The most standard line of philosophical critique involvedthe charges of irrationalism and relativism. Kuhn's philosophy—genera-tions of students have been told—deprives science of its distinctiverational gown; it renders theory-change a totally irrational act of group-conversion; each paradigm creates its own world; prevailing paradigms areabandoned in favour of other incommensurable ones through gestalt-switch-like transition—pretty much like what happened to Saul when heconverted to Christianity (Saint Paul) after a sudden vision.

Not that this is a totally unjustified, mythical, or fictitious, summary ofKuhn's views. In fact, we all know that lots of passages in The Structure—

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as well as its overall spirit—lend themselves to this interpretation. Theoft-quoted 'The proponents of competing paradigms practice their tradesin different worlds . . . Practising in different worlds, the two groups ofscientists see different things when they look from the same point of view inthe same direction' is just one among the many relevant testimonies. ButKuhn himself has persistently denied the relativist or irrationalist viewsthat are often attributed to him. Moreover, his own views on scientificdevelopment have evolved considerably since he first set off with TheStructure. Where do things stand now? What are the views that Kuhnreally held thirty-two years ago? How have these views evolved and whatdoes he believe now?

These are the questions that the two magnificent books under review setout to explore and answer. Paul Hoyningen-Huene's ReconstructingScientific Revolutions has performed a rather admirable task, which—asnoted in Kuhn's introduction to the book—has found Kuhn's ownapproval. Hoyningen-Huene has investigated all the bits and pieces thatKuhn has published and communicated before and after The Structureuntil the present and has produced a definitive critical exposition ofKuhn's views. Hoyningen-Huene's main achievement is an excellentnarrative of the evolution of Kuhn's thought. This book will enableKuhn's latest views to become better known and the shifts in his positionto be appreciated.

Hoyningen-Huene begins by exploring the philosophical presupposi-tions of Kuhn's views on science. This is a task that Kuhn himself has neversystematically performed. The point that Hoyningen-Huene presses in thefirst half of the book is that Kuhn's underlying philosophy is relativizedneo-Kantianism. It is neo-Kantianism because Kuhn sharply distinguishesbetween the world-in-itself, which is epistemically inaccessible to cognizers,and the phenomenal world, which is constituted by the cognizers' paradigmand is within their epistemic reach. But Kuhn's philosophy is relativizedneo-Kantianism, because, unlike Kant, Kuhn posits a plurality of phenom-enal worlds each being dependent on, and in fact constituted by, somecommunity's conceptual scheme.

Hoyningen-Huene goes on to question the very foundations of Kuhn'sfavourite philosophical framework. His major points are two. On the onehand, Kuhn's recourse to a world-in-itself (even in its post-1969 formula-tion as a world of purely object-sided stimuli) is rather a deus ex machina,its purpose being to ward off a form of idealism, or better a ratherrepugnant social solipsism that allows no possibility of two differentcommunities sharing the same phenomenal world. On the other hand,any attempt to characterize this object-sided world-in-itself—an attemptwhich, as Hoyningen-Huene ably shows, is indispensable in avoiding

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social solipsism—is radically at odds with Kuhn's central epistemic thesisthat no phenomenal world has any sort of privilege over any other (pp. 42-60). To be sure, as Hoyningen-Huene rather nicely points out, the Kuhnianworld-in-itself enters the stage as a source of possible resistances (pp. 48and 269). These resistances appear mostly as persistent anomalies whichshow that, somehow, the prevailing paradigm has had its day. Thepresence of resistances suggests that nature cannot be forced to fit in anyarbitrary conceptual scheme; hence, there is a sense in which nature isindependent of conceptual schemes. But, surprisingly enough, Kuhncomes to a point where he wants to dispense with even this anaemicworld-in-itself (cf. p. 60). And then even the sympathetic Hoyningen-Huene expresses his anxiety as to whether Kuhn 'avoids the solipsisticpitfalls of this position . . . ' (p. 60).

The other general issue that Reconstructing Scientific Revolutionsexplores is Kuhn's views on meaning and concept acquisition in science.The prime semantic message of The Structure is that scientific concepts arenot learned through grasping necessary and sufficient conditions for theirapplication in empirical situations. But, as Hoyningen-Huene makes vivid,The Structure has no articulate theory of meaning. In his later researchKuhn advanced a theory of concept acquisition that rests on graspingnetworks of similarity and dissimilarity relations (pp. 90-110). I person-ally think that Hoyningen-Huene's discussion of these issues in Chapter 3is probably the most valuable portion of Reconstructing Scientific Revolu-tions. Kuhn's recent views—as explicated further by Hoyningen-Huene—give a far-reaching account of concept formation in science.

Kuhn's initial vague term 'paradigm' has now been replaced by thesharper terms 'lexicon' and 'lexical structure'. A lexicon is 'the module inwhich members of a speech community store the community's kind-terms'(Kuhn's 'Afterwords' in World Changes, p. 315). The lexicon is constitu-tive of a phenomenal world in the sense that it creates a taxonomy of kindscorresponding to the concepts available to the speech community living inthis phenomenal world. Then, Kuhn says, trans-world traffic is oftenforbidden when the different communities have different lexical structuresthat cannot be mapped upon one another. This is, currently, the essence ofthe incommensurability thesis—which is now also milder than it used to bein that it allows comparison between theories and it renders untranslat-ability between different lexical structures local rather than global.Hoyningen-Huene (pp. 206-22) gives an excellent exposition of Kuhn'slatest views on incommensurability and attempts to spell out what theincommensurability thesis implies and what it does not.

While Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions puts an order to Kuhn'sphilosophy, World Changes sets Kuhn's philosophy in a broader philoso-

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phical perspective and attempts to appraise his views with respect to abroad array of philosophical issues. World Changes, based on a conferenceheld at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, is a splendidvolume with some state-of-the art philosophical and historical pieces.

The issues raised in World Changes range from John Earman's syste-matic comparison between Kuhn and Carnap—pointing to neglectedsimilarities and overstated differences between the two philosophers—toErnan McMullin's defence of truth and rationality in science and toMicheal Friedman's innovative paper showing how the development ofmodern philosophical thought has been largely the product of philoso-phers' sensitive response to advancements in science. In an attempt to takea glance ahead, Ian Hacking defends a nominalist interpretation of Kuhn'splurality-of-worlds thesis and Nancy Cartwright explores Kuhn's views onconcept-acquisition, which she embeds in her view of models as concreti-sations of abstract physical concepts. The collection also includes a key-note introduction by Horwich, and a moving appraisal by Carl Hempel.World Changes incorporates four significant historical papers by J. L.Heilborn, Noel Swerdlow, Jed Buchwald, and Norton Wise, all of whichhinge on Kuhn's latest views on lexical structures and concept-formation.It concludes with splendid afterwords by Kuhn himself, where, apart froman appraisal of his own philosophical development, it comprises also hislatest views on the dynamics of scientific growth.

All in all, we are presented with two excellent books that push ahead thephilosophical frontiers and do justice to the complex and evolving thoughtof one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of science ofthis century. I highly recommend them both.

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